Helvetica

Probably not surprisingly, Helvetica very quickly brought to mind McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message”. He writes that “the message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs” (108). The film certainly emphasized the ways in which the typeface changed the visual nature of a multiplicity of communications on an international scale. As the many designers in the film testified, Helvetica became associated with a variety of meanings quite apart from, or at least only tangentially related to, the content of the messages the words actually convey. I think the film raises questions about what kinds of implicit assumptions might go in to interacting with a medium so ubiquitous as to remain unnoticed by much of the general public. If on the one hand it has been seen as the font of modernism, wherein meaning is stable and perfection is possible, its very grounded associations might influence people’s responses to communication. One of the implicit meanings of the font, particularly when it is used in contexts geared toward mass communication, might then be that communication can be a stable egalitarian process. At the same time though, the film demonstrates the ways in which even the message of the medium is contested. I think Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding” speaks to some of the contention in the film, as it suggests all of the stages in communication during which a message can become changed or unstable (164). In the film, perfect form doesn’t necessarily equate to perfect communication. Indeed, the apparent asceticism of the font seemed to be part of the reason a number of people didn’t trust it; for many it began to be read as advancing normative ideas of social organization and power. Whatever else messages in Helvetica might be saying, these objectors saw the font as endorsing the primacy of “the man,” as it were. Even in cases where the institutional affiliations of the font were not a major concern, the film shows that a number of designers rejected it on the basis that in fact it could not communicate ideally, because of its symmetry and visual balance. This school of designers espoused the idea that the form could communicate best if it somehow reflected the emotive content of the message that it spelled out. Both the episodes of rejection and adoration of the font in the film then seem to suggest that even when the medium has a message, the changes it creates are not necessarily uniform and certain. Rather, its effects are multiple, unstable, and, if this documentary is any example, hotly contested.